


Before the Beginning and After the End

by JerusalemStrayCat



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Headcanon, How Do I Tag, SBURB, Skaia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2018-11-14 23:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11218449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JerusalemStrayCat/pseuds/JerusalemStrayCat
Summary: The Incipisphere didn't spontaneously generate right when the first player enters Sburb, and it doesn't just disappear when the game is over. What is happening in the Incipisphere when there is no game being played?





	1. After the End

What happens to a dead Incipisphere? Not a dead session, as in a game of Sburb with only one player. What happens to an Incipisphere after the game is no longer being played in it? After the players have escaped into their new universe, or into the Furthest Ring? Or maybe after they have all died?

The edge of the Incipisphere is not solid, but a gradient. Derse dreamers who listen to the Horrorterrors’ song know this about as well as anyone could. It is physically possible, if inadvisable, for one to simply float beyond Derse’s moon and into the Furthest Ring. A vague sense of _otherness_ is usually all that accompanies the transition from the Incipisphere to the Ring. Even the stuff of Paradox Space is slow to become chaotic until past a certain spatiotemporal distance from the session. Don’t be fooled by the relatively stable spacetime close to the edge of the Incipisphere - the Horrorterrors will still eat you, even if you are close enough to feel the safety of the Medium.

Some players have reported strange things happening to the Incipisphere, as they looked around one last time before following their co-players into the Endgame Door. It seems that the presence of Sburb players within the session has a stabilizing effect on its constructs. This stability begins to disintegrate as soon as the players begin to leave the Incipisphere.

It all goes to hell as soon as the Incipisphere is completely vacant.

It starts small. The code governing the physics begins to break down, causing the Veil to become unstable. The meteors drift into the center of the Medium, or out into the Ring. The built-up houses lose their structural integrity and collapse. The Skaian clouds begin to dissipate. If the Genesis Frog has already destroyed Skaia, the residual force from the Vast Croak knocks the Lands around like so many pool balls. If there is no Frog, the Lands simply spiral into the Battlefield. Whatever force holds together the dream moons weakens, causing the towers and catacombs of Prospit and Derse to detach and float free. The Incipisphere is soon reduced to floating bits of debris. Don’t worry about the NPCs - they die quickly.

Then it gets weirder.

The Angels are game constructs that spawn under certain circumstances. They appear as part of the Hopey Thing, more rarely as an NPC on someone’s Land. Usually, though, they function exactly as a certain Mage of Doom claimed. The game is over. The players are gone. For those who are unfamiliar with computer programming terms, “garbage collection” refers to a computer getting rid of an unneeded object to free up memory space. I suppose it’s more glamorous to say that Angels are used “two u2her iin the end” than “garbage collectors.” The Angels swoop around like the creepy fanged bird snakes they are, reducing what they can’t eat to dust.

From the outside, an active Incipisphere looks like a little solar system. Skaia in the middle, the lands around it, the Veil farther out, Prospit and Derse barely visible. The Medium is transparent. However, once the Angels finish their work, the Incipisphere would glow with their holy light, made hazy by the ambient dust, outshining any Genesis Frog that may be inside.

During this whole process, the borders of the Incipisphere gradually disappear. The Horrorterrors’ tentacles begin to burrow into the Medium like a toothpick through jelly. The less astute ones try to snap up some Angels before they unrender and dissolve. This proves to be a mistake, as Angelic and Grimdark forces are like matter and anti-matter. If a Horrorterror survives an Angel encounter, it will learn to stay well away from Angels.

Eventually, nothing remains of the session at all. This is the fate that will befall the A2 and B2 sessions. A neat and tidy death, as that little patch of Paradox Space is reintegrated into the Ring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone. This is my first work on AO3, and it will be dedicated to my cool Sburb headcanons. No update schedule - I'll just add whenever. Leave feedback please! -jsc


	2. Before the Beginning

Let’s rewind.

Before the Angels glowed through the dust, before the players were dropped unceremoniously in the game their lives would become, before Derse and Prospit declared war on each other.

Every Incipisphere starts as a single point in the Furthest Ring. The spacetime around that point untangles slightly in preparation for the Incipisphere’s creation. The nearby Horrorterrors retreat. Then, suddenly, an astonishing amount of sense begins to be made within a small section of stabilized spacetime. The borders of the newborn Incipisphere solidify slightly, and voila! A wonderful new blank slate, an ideal environment to run some game code. It’s even got Euclidean geometry and everything.

The Sburb code begins to run. This event takes place as soon as the Frog Temple runes are transcribed, decoded, and made into executable files, since that is the point at which the game becomes inevitable. Once the game is made, there is nothing in Paradox Space that can stop it from being played. Any timeline in which it is prevented - the players don’t install the game, the Frog Temple is never discovered, whatever - is a doomed offshoot.

Skaia wakes up and becomes sentient. It can see forward and backward in time - or rather, up and down lines of causality - in any realm its players affect. This power grants it the ability to find its players, and prepare the Incipisphere accordingly. At this point, any mention of “the code” can be substituted with Skaia.

Skaia loads the appropriate Land options, populates the Medium's lore with references to events past and future, and, at last, brings the bodies of the Medium into corporeal existence. To an outside observer, the formerly empty Incipisphere would suddenly be filled with colorful bodies of various sizes, starting as large simple polyhedrons and and accruing small details as the rendering and texturing progresses.

The Incipisphere is now adequately prepared. Skaia shines in the center, the Battlefield in its midst shrouded by a thick layer of brilliant clouds that reflect random moments within Skaia’s purview. Golden Prospit circles close, its chained satellite dipping gently into the clouds. The Lands, darkened until the players enter, orbit farther out. Then comes the formidable Veil, with its mystery and machinery, then Derse, brushing the Incipisphere’s edge with its moon. Only one thing is missing - life.

The Denizens are not truly alive, nor are the consorts. They can only speak when approached, and generate their utterances with a primitive form of AI. If killed, they dissolve into pixels. The carapacians, however, are living and sentient organic beings. They cannot spawn out of thin air. Well, the royal pieces do, albeit indirectly. The Kings and Queens hatch out of eggs in their respective throne rooms, already knowing their purpose. Their first act is to declare war between the moons and begin growing soldiers in the ectolabs of the Veil.

The war continues to rage through all of history, swinging this way and that, but always creeping in the same direction. The players are scheduled to arrive the instant Prospit is on the verge of defeat. Time flows differently around the Incipisphere than it does on the host planet. In the time that it takes for the Frog Temple runes to be deciphered and the resulting game to be distributed, thousands of years will have passed - enough time to flesh out the shared mythos of Prospit and Derse and fill the libraries on the moons and the Battlefield.


	3. The Scratch

The way that Sburb is propagated allows for thousands, millions, of sessions to originate on a single host planet. However, due to the way causality works, only one has the potential to be fertile. The vast majority of sessions don't progress far enough to necessitate the creation of an Incipisphere, and those that do may not have the right assortment of players to see the game to its completion. If not that, then some condition or event prevents the session from succeeding.

Every session with a Time player is provided with a “reset button,” and every session with a Space player is provided with the means to activate it. Ironically enough, this means that the only sessions with the option to reset are the ones with the greatest chance to succeed. If the Time and Space players join forces, then they can reset their universe to a time before the session started. The Scratch, as the reset is colloquially called, causes Skaia to create a time paradox in the Incipisphere, destroying it from the inside out.

The process of Scratching a session involves retrieving the Quills of Echidna from the eponymous Denizen, which can only be found in a session with a Space player, and using them to damage a musically-themed mechanism located on the Time player's Land. The Quills are the only items sharp and hard enough to release the temporal energy from the Scratch mechanism, which collects in the outer edge of the Medium and blocks anything from passing through.

The mechanism is then detached from the Land and launched into Skaia. Upon absorbing the mechanism, Skaia retroactively changes the destination times of some of its defense portals. The resulting paradox kickstarts the messy demise of the Incipisphere. The chaos caused by the Scratch is not the tidy, systematic destruction of a naturally decaying session. There is no grace period of destabilization before the end. Death by Scratch, though much quicker than being eaten by Angels, is far more gruesome.

As soon as the paradox-clone-carrying meteors pass through the portals, Skaia itself starts to disintegrate. It unrenders in a piecemeal fashion, textures stripped away to reveal a crumbling wireframe and the code underneath. Once Skaia is gone, the fate of the Incipisphere is sealed. A sphere of nothingness expands at the speed of light from Skaia’s former location, as if from a vacuum phase transition, annihilating everything within the Incipisphere. If one could take a snapshot of a single moment of an Incipisphere in the process of being Scratched, one would be faced with a horrible sight. Lands sliced up without time to unrender. Lines of code transformed into gibberish that causes madness in anyone who dares to read it. Carapacians and players, their bodies half consumed before they realize what's happening to them. At least they can't feel any of it.

The bubble of void reaches the web of temporal energy near the edge of the Incipisphere. The session is gone. An outside observer would see a black void where the session was, enclosed by a network of fluctuating threads of energy, the visual equivalent of what a skipping CD sounds like.

Now what? There is a gap of space in the Furthest Ring which, according to causality, has no right to be there. The only thing keeping it from abandoning its laws of physics and assimilating into the Ring is a spherical net of pure time. The separation is untenable. With a soundless snap, the space and time reintegrate, sending shockwaves throughout Paradox Space.

With all this carrying on, it's a wonder that the Horrorterrors have suffered universes to exist so long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this is it for now. If I think of something else to add, I will do so, but I am fairly confident that this chapter is the last. Thanks for reading!


End file.
